From President Trump's racist tweets to the 2020 election to the Apollo moon landing, here are some of our top columns of the week.

In today's fast-paced news environment, it can be hard to keep up. For your weekend reading, we've started in-case-you-missed-it compilations of some of the week's top USA TODAY Opinion pieces. As always, thanks for reading, and for your feedback.

"Once again, our national dialogue has been hijacked by the immature, racist tweets of a man I’ve known for more than 20 years who is unraveling before our eyes on Twitter and on live television. As much as I want to believe that my former acquaintance’s election was a fluke, it’s time we simply admit the truth: President Donald Trump got elected because of his racism, not in spite of it. My former party, including its voters, has been infected by it. And if we’re not incredibly careful, he’ll be re-elected — because racism is a powerful drug. ... The inconvenient truth about the Trump presidency is that it’s a reflection on all of us. It is a hysterical reaction to having had our first black president, and it’s time we stop pretending that Trump is somehow playing four-dimensional chess. It’s time to stop pretending that Trump isn’t a racist himself, and it’s time to acknowledge it’s the racism that attracted his base to him in the first place."

"When someone has a tumor, you don’t kill the patient to get rid of it — you cut out the tumor. But in December, when a federal court found the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate was unconstitutional, it killed the whole law instead of cutting out the one part that was malignant. ...Courts don’t write laws; Congress does. When one part of a law is found by a court to be unconstitutional, the court generally should defer to Congress and leave the rest of it in place, except in limited, extreme cases. That’s not what happened here. Instead of using the legal scalpel it was obligated to use, the court fired up a chainsaw. ... If this faulty court ruling survives appeal, it would end the ACA in its entirety and throw the lives of millions of Americans into chaos. One of the key features of the ACA is that it prevents health insurers from denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions. By killing the whole law, the courts would kill this protection as well."

"My tío, Miguel Hernandez, ... lived in Houston, Texas, which, for a Cuban American kid like me growing up in Miami, was as faraway and foreign as Anchorage. ... To our family, though, Miguel was a living legend, someone who worked for NASA, lunched with astronauts and met presidents. It wasn’t until much later, however, that I discovered the depth of his role in helping U.S. astronauts reach the moon — and the unlikely path from Havana to Houston that got him there. ... When he had learned enough English, Miguel attended the University of Florida, graduating with a mechanical engineering degree. When NASA recruiters visited his campus in 1966, he jumped at the chance to work at the space agency. ... By 1969 buzz was mounting for the Apollo 11 moon landing. Miguel was swept up in the fervor. He and his team worked 24-hour shifts, double-checking systems and readying the astronauts to reach the moon."

"No, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is not a racist. Yes, she has been an ally of women of color for her entire 31-year career in Congress. ... Yet freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has it right — Speaker Pelosi is old guard. She does not like her new, high-profile women of color members nipping at her heels. She paid her dues. She worked her way up through the male dominated congressional system for decades. ... The real issue here is what we academics call 'intersectionality' — the combined impact of racism, sexism and other types of discrimination on people and groups. In practice, it means that white women in power often take on the same characteristics of white men in power toward women of color. ... Speaker Pelosi (shouldn't) silence AOC or condemn her. It is to listen and learn and find a way to work together. This is not Congress in 1978, 1988 or 1998. This is 2019. People of color have a voice. Women of color have a voice."

"Like it or not, the Democratic party has had greatness thrust upon it. Every American who believes in the basic foundations of the American experiment, things like the rule of law, the Constitution and an apolitical Justice Department, now has a stake in who Democrats nominate in 2020. So please stop telling fellow travelers like me to mind our own business. ... Don’t treat this like a base election. Democrats are already guaranteed a nominee that will excite their base and drive a big turnout. His name is Donald Trump. Getting activists 'excited' by bold policy positions is a waste of time. ... The people you really have to motivate ... (are) the people in the middle who have been unsettled by Trump’s presidency. They can see what Trump is and will happily vote for a reasonable alternative. But if Democrats offer what appears to them as a choice between death by hanging and death by firing squad, a lot of them will just give up and not vote at all."

"It was amusing at the start of the great racist tweet controversy to hear the media asking, 'Is President Donald Trump a racist?' We are well beyond such questions. ... Americans have survived racist presidents before. Woodrow Wilson, a southerner, opposed postwar Reconstruction because 'the dominance of an ignorant and inferior race was justly dreaded.' ... Calvin Coolidge signed an immigration bill aimed at keeping out 'the yellow peril' — i.e. Asians, along with Africans and Arabs. ... And everyone knows that after Pearl Harbor was bombed, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, leading to the forced relocation of 117,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast to inland internment camps. ... Trump seems to hate America himself. After all, he has complained about several amendments to our Constitution. He has complained about our system of checks and balances, our judicial system, our free press, people who are different than him. Why does he hate the things that make our country great?"